Even with smart and well-meaning people in all sectors of healthcare, let’s face it: patient transitions are simply hard to get right. Payers, referral sources, and providers juggle various priorities among growing patient populations with complex needs, and they are not always on the same page when it comes to moving patients from one care setting to the next.
These challenges certainly exist for home-based care agencies, who recently indicated in a study sponsored by healthcare workflow management company Forcura that more than 70% of participants manage as many as five referral channels. The results can be dire, as another statistic revealed with more than 44% of participants acknowledging that poorly managed care transitions have had a very negative or extremely negative impact on their patients.
To improve patient care transitions, all stakeholders must be open to building relationships by finding common ground and aligning needs – a topic that surfaced during a recent Forcura webinar featuring a payer, physician, and home-based care provider. The latter suggested that being a home-based care agency that’s easy to work with can go a long way toward gaining favor with referral sources and achieving shared goals.
So how do you make your agency easier to work with referring partners? In today’s high-stakes environment, it will take more than diligence and talent. You need technology that empowers your staff to quickly gather referrals regardless of delivery method, process them efficiently in one place, monitor their progress across the team, and securely send data to your electronic health record (EHR) with ease. You need to show your partners that you have the chops to handle what they send your way.
In short, you need Forcura’s Workflow for Referrals solution.
Technology that Drives Value
As one Forcura client explains in a featured success story, “Time after time, [our referral sources] will tell our intake nurse, ‘We call you all the time because it’s so easy to work with you and the physicians are thrilled with the outcome of the patients.’ So having that interaction with Forcura and our referral sources is actually driving our improvements in growth as a company.”
This is the kind of impact Workflow for Referrals could provide your agency, with numbers you can quantify – 50% reduction in patient onboarding time and 208% ROI, to name a few – and long-term value your agency needs to build a solid reputation with other stakeholders.
Workflow for Referrals – one of several solutions within the Forcura workflow management platform – gives your back-office personnel state-of-the-art tools that not only make their jobs easier but demonstrate downstream results that referring partners love and want to sustain with more of their business. Consider the following workflow features that will bolster your intake process:
Access and Admin
- Assign security groups to control which users have access to referrals
- Assign referrals to specific branches or teams for processing
- Assign tags to referrals to help manage the workflow
- Customize workflow statuses to your specific needs
Processing
- Digitally collect and manage all documentation and data in a single workflow regardless of referral delivery method (fax, portals, etc.)
- Easily filter and sort referrals by status, age, and other fields
- Annotate, split, and combine referral documents and more
- Enable smooth flow of documents and associated data into your EHR through integrations that Forcura has developed with industry-leading vendors
Compliance and Analytics
- Keep an audit record of all users who access the referral with date and time
- Capture all steps in the workflow for referencing and reviewing
- Analyze and report on referral volumes, elapsed processing times, user productivity, and more
Technology that Removes Barriers
Having the right technology to provide workflow efficiency and insights will help your home-based care agency develop trusted relationships that enable all parties to focus together on greater challenges and the overall goal of improving patient care.
If you want to manage your referrals more effectively and distinguish yourself as a home-based care organization of choice, reach out to one of our experts today about Forcura’s Workflow for Referrals solution.
In addition to Workflow for Referrals, Forcura offers highly effective solutions for care plan management, including a Workflow for Care Plans component that helps your team coordinate approvals from signing providers. Learn more today!
